Page 12 - Art First: Bridget Macdonald: This Green Earth

reappears in her more recent works such as Bull in a Flowering Meadow. Claude had more
than once depicted this ancient Greek legend, as retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, notably in his
painting, Coast Scene with the Rape of Europa (1667, Royal Collection, London). Such synthesis
of memory, classical prototypes and reality is central to Bridget’s practice.

Bridget works predominantly in graphic media and oils and feels that she has a particular affinity
with charcoal, revelling in its simplicity of means, expressive power and capacity to evoke dark-
ness, space, movement, light and flux. She also likes the immediacy, subtlety and versatility of oil,
with its opportunities for working with soft brushes, fingers and rags; but she has never got on
very well with printmaking or anything that requires too many processes. For her, drawing and
painting are equal but alternative ways of realising certain ideas and have always progressed
in tandem—yet in recent years figures seem to have appeared more frequently in her drawings
than in the paintings. Most of the oils in the current exhibition are painted on a generous scale
and one, Winter Cattle, is particularly big. An ongoing yearning for the imagined peace and tran-
quillity of rural life, rather than its ‘obvious jarring realities’ continues to drive her in all
media. Thus The Bridge across the Flooded River showing Carrington Bridge spanning the River
Severn out of banks, introduces a poignant contrast between the silent landscape and the
intrud ing traffic, tail lights and noise. The pylons, too, are an essential element ‘but so are the
echoes in my mind of other associations, such as Noah’s flood and rising waters due to global
warming.’ It may also be perhaps that Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed (1844, National Gallery,
London) with its striking perspective of Maidenhead railway bridge, played a part—conscious
or not—in the emergence of this composition.

Poetry is important for Bridget and has helped to validate landscape as a source of inspiration
for her, creating images in the mind which she might want to capture in her own work. The
cadences of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad seem inherent in some of her pictures:
In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.